Monsters and children and...more monsters, oh my!

[tidesnpc]

Characters: Everyone in the Badlands fighting!
Content: The Badlands is being attacked by monsters! And children!
Setting: Various places in the Badlands, plus the Convoy itself for gunners and powder monkeys
Notes: Remember, the Convoy and the Amestris are heading for the south, while Serenity is in the Garrettstown/mountains area. However, if you

Comments

Sorry about the deleted comment - forgot to change the subject. We're good to NPC ourselves!

[surfaceshine]

The world was trying to fall apart around their ears, but this at least Dean understood; people needed help, monsters needed put down, and his place in all of it was as simple and straightforward as he liked it. Less so how he was going to go about winning this, but, one thing at a time. He'd declared his intentions as soon as he saw the cards: gunning down more special children, or work he understood and knew, it wasn't really a choice. Plenty of people needed help and he separated from Serenity at Garrettstown long enough to find a cheap mare (read: probably unintentionally stole) and ride hard for where the reports of monsters were coming from.

His knee was still bothering him, but the young hunter had ridden longer with worse and it wasn't difficult to push it from his mind; he didn't let it keep him from considering the horse, though he was careful to remember that he had to be able to do something when they encountered the resistance they'd been promised, so mostly he just let her choose the pace and only pushed her when it became clear she was only being lazy.

The excellent time they'd made, however, was little comfort once they were standing on a small rise, looking across a flat expanse at the creature dragging itself closer to a settlement that Dean didn't know the name of. The Impala had been loose in her holster against his thigh ever since their last break had turned up a small group of refugees with reports of it, and the hand not gathering in the reins to reassure the mare shifting uneasily beneath him rested on the grip now. Squinting over the landscape, Dean frowned more with his eyes and his voice than his mouth when he spoke without looking away.

"So. I got nothin'. Go for the eyes, ya think?"

[son_of_the_lake]

Hisoka was standing a little way away, on top of a big rock. He was peering into the distance, shading his eyes with his hand, watching the creature's approach. The Gods only knew what it even was. It had not come from this landscape, and it was not at home here. Like the rest of the strange beings released by the upheaval of the earth's structures, and like the Sky Serpent, it did not have any way of living here except to destroy or simply overrun whatever it found. It had already decimated one settlement and it was heading for another. And there was no way to put it back where it belonged.

"Yeah, I think. Here it comes." Hisoka was holding a 12-gauge double barreled shotgun (which he had picked up in Garrettstown), but he had not shouldered it. He was waiting for the creature to get within forty or fifty yards. It had clearly spotted them, and had changed direction in order to head straight for them. The sun struck the great metallic eyes in painful bursts of light as it turned. Its three legs were kicking up dust as it tramped and scrabbled along up a long rocky slope.

[surfaceshine]

The mare threw her head and protested their lack of movement when she seemed to realize what kind of danger they were in; Dean kind of agreed, but there wasn't a lot for it. Instead he soothed her quietly and, while it was headed for them and Hisoka was keeping an eye on it, backed he back down the rise and out of sight of it. When she'd finally stopped flicking her ears back and forth in agitation, he dismounted and slipped the bridle off her face to hang on her neck, trading it for the halter and leadrope to tie her off to a nearby log. He patted her neck as he walked back up the hill.

"Wait here for us, sweetheart. This won't take long one way or the other."

The progress it had made when Dean retook his position was startling, but the young hunter didn't let that show. He'd shifted his secondary pistol and holster forward on his hip for easier access - the khukri wasn't likely to be much use this time - and brought his own hunting rifle with him from the saddle holster. The Impala was in his hand.

"Alright. Here goes nothing anyway." He raised the gun, sighting along the distance that had closed just enough to where he could be sure of some kind of accuracy; it wouldn't be as precise as he'd like it, but he figured it'd be a mistake to wait that long. He inhaled and held it, waiting for the wind to die down, for the thing to react to being in danger; when it didn't, when the wind kept up, he adjusted for it without much thought. On the exhale, he squeezed the trigger.

[son_of_the_lake]

Hisoka had remained on watch while Dean led the mare to a safer place. By the time the hunter returned, the valigarmanda had stomped its way up the stony slope, and was now reaching the uncomfortably close point. Hisoka could hear its pronged grippers scraping along the rough ground, and Hisoka thought he saw one of them strike a long blue spark off a rock.

As Dean spoke, Hisoka said, "Right," and let the creature have it with both barrels. The shotgun kicked against his shoulder.

The valigarmanda faltered as its left eye was struck first by the round from Dean's rifle and then by the shot string from Hisoka's gun. A long black line ran down the eye, and it took Hisoka a second to recognize it as a crack, as though the orb were glass or brittle metal. The immense mask swung slowly to the left, and then it swung back to the right, finally orienting towards Dean and Hisoka once more.

The creature resumed it's forward motion.

Hisoka raised the shotgun and fired again, this time aiming for the right eye.

[surfaceshine]

"...huh." Dean made a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat, forcing down the familiar buzz of nerves behind the every bit as familiar, steady dam of professionalism. From the corner of his eye he saw Hisoka adjust his aim, but Dean's hand didn't waver; he saw the crack, too, and held steady aim on it when he fired his next two shots.

"And Sam says I'm dense!"

[son_of_the_lake]

Hisoka fired, exploding the glaring right eye. Dean's two shots shattered the valigarmanda's enormous left eye. The glassy shards fell to the ground.

Hisoka snorted derisively. "Sam is welcome to show up and lend us a hand!" He broke the action open, swiftly inserted two more shells, closed and latched the mechanism and cocked the hammers.

The bird-faced being stopped in its tracks. Then it began that ponderous head-turning again, a pendulum-like motion except that the swinging was in the horizontal plane. This time, it seemed to falter, unsure of the location of its two human attackers. Then, it carefully braced two of its "feet," and lifted the third. Suddenly a roaring orange flame leapt in a twenty-yard jet directly at Dean and Hisoka.

"Duck!" screamed Hisoka, falling off the rock.

[surfaceshine]

Dean followed suit with his own gun, taking the time while he had it to return himself to full load; he snorted. "If Sam were here, we'd already know where it came from, how to kill it, what food it likes to eat, and what it looks for in women." It was equal parts exasperation and fondness - and a bit of relief backed with annoyance that Sam wasn't here. His help would've been more than welcome; his presence would have been more than concerning.

Of course, Dean looked up from reloading into the preparations of the thing to - really? No, really? The young hunter had come to much the same conclusion as Hisoka about the time the other man yelled, and he simultaneously dropped into a crouch and threw himself sideways.

"Sonnuvabitch!" Dean hit shoulder first and decently hard, but he'd had worse and continued, instead, to encourage his rolling momentum until he'd fetched up against more cover slightly downhill from his original position. He came up with his gun ready onto one knee, the heat of the fire still pushing against the skin of his face and forearms, and was instantly struck by the idea.

"Dude!" He called, because that's how he rolls. "You ever seen a Vohemaro cattle roundup?" It's insane. It also is apparent that he and Hisoka are not going to shoot the thing to death, so they need to try something else.

[son_of_the_lake]

"Yeah, as a matter of fact," answered Hisoka, cautiously lifting his head to see what the valigarmanda was up to. It was lumbering nearer, but very slowly, as though wanting to check out the results of its fiery blast. "What did you have in mind?"

[surfaceshine]

Dean is content to let it, noting that it doesn't really seem to be reacting to their voices, let alone the words they're saying. The young hunter holds his beloved revolver up to illustrate his words. "We need more firepower - these ain't gonna cut it with this thing. And I dunno about you, but I left all my artillery shells back at the manse." Then he tilts his head at the now-lowered legcannon on the valigarmanda.

"One of us needs to distract it. The other needs to hop aboard and then annoy it until it shoots itself, if we can." Dean doesn't really sound like this might not be a perfectly viable plan. In fact, he kind of sounds exactly like he did when he first asked Hisoka if he wanted to ride the mare for a while, not hop aboard a homicidal world-destroying coatrack.

[son_of_the_lake]

"Sure thing," responded Hisoka, "and since you're the one with the equestrian skills, you can be the bronco-buster." He was perfectly serious. "Would now be a good time?"

He eyed the valigamanda, stood up, waved, and shouted, "Hey, you FAILED TO MAKE TOAST OF ME! He dashed down the slope and angled sharply towards the creature, then swerved. It lifted its foot...a different foot, this time...and sent a blast of what looked like water at Hisoka. But it was some other substance, and steamed and crackled, freezing the air as it went, and a shower of ice crystals littered the stony ground beneath it. Hisoka ran almost right under it's foot, and as he ran, he put his hand on his head and found ice in his hair.

[surfaceshine]

"Dude. Run fast." Dean didn't bother protesting; he assumed, correctly, that he wouldn't get a chance, and in the next moment Hisoka was off.

It wasn't, exactly, that Dean hadn't realized the potential for the other feet to do something; he was just mostly focused on the fire one, for some reason, probably instinctively. Fire was what he was most comfortable with, what he'd used for most of his life to destroy things just like the thing in front of him, shooting at his friend.

Three loaded limbs, though, made his job a bit harder. Not that it would stop him - not that it could. He holstered the Impala without taking his eyes off Hisoka, changing it out for the khukri blade he hadn't thought he'd need. When the creature missed, its attention clearly on Hisoka, Dean shifted his weight in his crouch and moved forward quickly low to the ground, the blade held down against his forearm.

He didn't let himself hesitate, reaching with his free hand to grab the nearest part of the nearest leg as soon as he was within range; he used it to haul himself up, bringing his frame as far up as he could get before stabbing forward with the knife for another, higher handhold.

[son_of_the_lake]

Hisoka had heard that Dude, run fast. He didn't have time to turn and throw a smile back at Dean.

The minute the hunter began to move across the ground, Hisoka ran clockwise around that scrambling base of three monstrous metallic limbs, causing the immense impassive shatter-eyed face to pull its whole body around to keep up with him. He shouted again, and jumped up and down as well, as soon as he saw the hunter seize hold of a leg and begin to climb. The valigarmanda was so focused on Hisoka that it failed to respond to the real threat. It flung another blast of freezing fluid at the little gunner, as it scrabbled around in a circle and struggled to keep its balance on two legs - one of which was weighed down with Dean - while trying to aim another at Hisoka.

[surfaceshine]

Once, when Dean was fourteen, Dad had taken he and Sam rock climbing in the foothills at the northernmost reaches of the Badlands. There hadn't, miraculously, been a hunt that week; it was merely survival training, though Dean tried to distract his younger brother from it by making games out of everything. They'd started out with safety lines, learning how to use them to steady each other up the unfamiliar landscape, but by the fourth day they'd been confident enough to discard the precautionary gear and by the sixth, they were crawling all around the cliffs and boulders like they had eight legs themselves. Dean remembered with distinct clarity the dusty, hot air, the unfiltered sun beating down on his fair-skinned shoulders, the scrape of rock against his raw knuckles and sore fingertips as he sought the tiny handholds up the stone faces, the shift of burning sand beneath bare toes, Sam complaining loudly enough before or behind him that he didn't need to look for him to know where he was - even though Dean did look, just to make sure.

This was nothing like that.

C'mon, c'mon, c'mon you sonnuvabitch... Dean ground his teeth together with the effort of not swearing out loud, not daring in case the thing noticed by sound what it had failed to feel - that or it just didn't care. Yet. Either way, Dean twisted the blade where it had sunk in two or so inches, not trusting his weight to it for long; his fingertips found a niche in the smooth, hot metal and he twisted his hand viciously to wedge them in, hauling himself quickly up to the joint in the leg. He could feel the precarious way the thing wobbled about on two legs, trying to split his attention equally between what he was doing himself, which leg it was trying to use to fire at his friend, and where Hisoka was; all in all, though, he wasn't even breathing hard by the time he'd decided he'd climbed high enough and, hooking his knees around the nearest complimentary angles of the thing, clamped on for dear life like he'd ever clung to horseback or a steep vertical drop.

Finally, he exhaled words with his held breath. "Alright, you hunk-a scrap, let's see what you got." He wedged the tip of the khukri into the nearest crack he could find in the materials putting the thing together, and levered as hard as he could to try to pull it up and find something to stab at while he was up here.

[son_of_the_lake]

As Dean pried at the valigarmanda's carapace, it seemed to hesitate, turning its bird-face again, almost quizzically. As soon as it did this, it put the ice-element leg back down on the ground.

Hisoka took this opportunity to dart between the fire-element leg and the leg of unknown capacity (the one Dean had climbed). He was now underneath the bird-faced being's tripod of limbs.

Just at this moment, the creature teetered a little as it tried to shift its balance and lift the fire-element leg. Hisoka suddenly had a grim suspician that the valigarmanda was planning to nudge Dean with a blast of flame, as a person might casually reach up and rake a spider off his or her own shoulder with a swipe of the hand.

So Hisoka ran out from under the tripod. He stooped, picked up in both hands a rock the size of his head, and hit the fire-leg's hovering gripper a solid, ringing whack! Then he started to slide out of the way fast, so that he himself might not be toasted.

But he had miscalculated. The flame leg was set back down with a metallic clunk! and the leg of unknown capacity was picked up -- and it suddenly snaked between the other two and came right at him. There was a dazzling blue torrent of sparks, and Hisoka was thrown fifteen feet and crashed into a patch of sand.

For a moment, the valigarmanda seemed to want to walk over there and step on him. But then it changed its mind and started to lift the ice-leg and curl it up towards Dean. However, as it tried to put its weight on the foot of the flame-leg, it stumbled. Possibly Hisoka had damaged it.

[surfaceshine]

Dean had not been oblivious to the thing's intentions to swat him off, necessarily, but he had chosen to ignore it in favor of peeling away a big enough hole for him to see what he was doing; he was, however, caught off guard when all of a sudden the leg lurched beneath him and his center of gravity shifted wildly.

"Sonnuvabitch!" Dean swore emphatically when he was flung sideways and lost his grip with his legs, forcing him to stop what he was doing and cling with his arms. Darting a glance to see what was going on, he felt his heart skip a beat or two when Hisoka went flying, and in that splitsecond changed his plan of attack from clinging for dear life to actively letting his bodyweight drop hard against his shoulders with the momentum from the movement of the leg. He could already feel it was off balance, maybe the extra help from his own 175 lbs would tip it just that bit further.

He didn't count on it, though. The young hunter had had to release his hold on his knife to avoid being tossed clear completely, but it was still wedged into the space next to the leg joint. Muscles straining to pull himself back in close to the valigarmanda, he once more got his legs locked into place and freed up his hands. Yanking at the blade, widening the gap in the carapace, he drew his backup gun with his other hand and wedged the muzzle in right next to his khukri. This pistol held eight shots - he unloaded half of them before pausing to check for a reaction, and glancing back at Hisoka.

[son_of_the_lake]

The valigarmanda was already in the midst of stumbling on its flame-leg when Dean threw his weight against the creature's body in such a way as to increase the tipping motion and help that leg fail.

The monster teeterd precariously.

As Dean fired his weapon into the crevice between plates of armor, the creature's electric leg suddenly went wholly dead, and it buckled. He had hit whatever it used for a sciatic nerve and unstrung the limb.

It pawed frantically at the ground with its flame-leg but couldn't shift enough weight onto that, and it tilted ponderously and began to fall silently and almost lazily towards the ground.

Hisoka, meantime, opened his eyes and let the sky in. He thought he had heard four muffled thuds. He recognized that these sounds might have something to do with Dean, and he had a confused sense that his friend was in danger. Out of the side of his eye, he saw an immense blue shadow lengthening on the ground, and it had such an odd shape! Then there was an ear-splitting, jangling crash!, and a pounding of flailing and useless metallic grippers, and clouds of choking dust spewing up into the air from where the valigarmanda struck the earth. Its nerveless flame-leg slapped down hard just a few feet from where Hisoka lay. He blinked.

He licked the dust off his lips. "Dean?" he said, numbly reaching out a hand to try and lever himself up. He rolled to his hands and knees and began to crawl towards the wreckage. "DEAN!!"